News Burst 28 February 2022 – Get The News!

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• Nearly 15,000 flights with less than 10% of the seats sold departed from the UK during 19 months of the pandemic, according to official figures revealed earlier this month. The data – released by the aviation minister Robert Courts on the UK Parliament website – shows that the near-empty flights departed from 32 UK airports. The data was collected by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) on commercial flight operations and covers the period between March 2020 and September 2021.

• Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has ordered the funding of lethal military assistance for Ukraine – a step up from his previous commitment to non-lethal aid – as the military conflict between Kiev and Moscow continues. Morrison said that Canberra would provide military assistance through the US, UK, and other NATO member states rather than shipping arms from Australia directly “because that’s the most effective way to do it.”

• Last October former POTUS Donald Trump insisted new analysis showed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s donation of roughly $419.5 million to election offices through a pair of nonprofits was “illegal”, having purportedly boosted Democratic turnout in key areas. Former President Donald Trump told an annual gathering of conservative activists in Orlando, Florida, on Saturday that a forensic audit should be carried out of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s megabuck cash injections into election office. “And let’s do a full forensic audit of the $417 million given by Mark Zuckerberg – who used to come to the White House and kiss my *ss – they spent to take over local election offices in key Democrat counties,” he said.

• The Hungarian-American financier George Soros has spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars promoting “democracy” initiatives across Eastern Europe, including in Ukraine, where he supported both the first Orange Revolution in 2004, and the February 2014 coup which paved the way to the current crisis. Soros has compared the “brave” Ukrainian military facing off against Russian troops to actual World War II-era German forces, including the Waffen-SS. Soros, who is of Jewish descent, was a 14-year-old boy living in Budapest at the time of the Soviet operation, and, according to his biography, managed to survive the 1944 Nazi takeover because his father purchased documents saying the family were Christians. In 1998, Soros admitted in a 60 Minutes interview that he took part in the confiscation of property from other Jews in Nazi-occupied Budapest, but characterized himself as “only a spectator” and said he had “no sense of guilt” for what he did.

• Soros’ Open Society Foundations have been active in Ukraine since 1990, when the country was still part of the Soviet Union, spending over $100 million on ‘civil society initiatives’ in areas including education, media and culture to promote Western-style democracy and capitalism. The billionaire boasted in 2014 that his money and organisations sponsored by his NGOs “played an important part” in assuring the victory of the February 2014 Maidan coup. Soros’ OSF was banned in Russia in late 2015 as a threat to state security, but continues to operate in dozens of countries around the world, including the US.

• A barrage of hacker attacks followed after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a special military operation in Ukraine on 24 February. Sputnik German SNA Website was hit by a DDoS attack late on Sunday, a day after a wave of cyberattacks targeted the international version of the Sputnik News Agency along with the Czech and Polish websites. Problems with access were also experienced by other Russian web pages, including ones that belong to Roscosmos, RT, governmental bodies, services and other companies. On Friday, the Anonymous hacker group declared a “cyberwar” on the Russian government amid the situation in Ukraine.

• Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has fully ceased supplies to Russia and to its suppliers after scrutinizing the sanctions in order to comply with them, according to Taiwanese media agency CNA’s sources. TSMC also suspended production of Russia-designed semiconductors Elbrus, CNA reported, citing its sources. The new round of sanctions will prohibit Russian firms from purchasing an array of high-tech products, including semiconductors, computers, telecommunications, information security equipment, lasers, and sensors.

• Ukrainian and Russian officials will meet for talks at a venue on the Belarusian border with Ukraine, president Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s office said on Sunday. The talks would be held without preconditions and are the result of a phone call between Zelenskiy and the Belarusian president, Zelenskiy said, citing a Reuters report. “We agreed that the Ukrainian delegation would meet with the Russian delegation without preconditions on the Ukrainian-Belarusian border, near the Pripyat River,” he said in a statement.

• In Search of Cracks in Albert Einstein’s Theory of Gravity –Celia Escamilla-Rivera is combining large data sets with supercomputers to test general relativity against its little-known competitors. “We’re invoking these mysterious things,” said the cosmologist Celia Escamilla-Rivera.“I am strongly convinced that alternative theories of gravity are needed,” reports Quanta. Escamilla-Rivera is searching for another, more complete theory. A bewildering array of alternatives to general relativity have been put forward over time, from “teleparallel gravity” to “complex quintessence” and “negative-mass cosmology,” but they long seemed like theoretical fancies.

• The US grant, one of the most debated agreements in the country’s history, gets through the House. Signed in September 2017, the MMillennium Challenge Corporation Nepal Compact, which is meant for building electricity transmission lines and improving roads in Nepal, had become a hugely divisive issue in Nepal. The opposers of the compact had stepped up ultranationalistic rhetoric, saying some of the compact provisions undermine Nepal’s sovereignty. With the passage of the compact, which had been in Parliament since July 2019, Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba has pulled off a coup, as he has not only managed to stick to the deadline of February 28 given to the United States, but also saved the coalition from breaking apart.

• Former White House physician Ronny Jackson responded to Russia’s attack on Ukraine by warning that Joe Biden is not “cognitively… fit to be our president right now.” “The whole country is seeing his mental cognitive issues on display for over a year now, and there’s really no question in most people’s minds that there’s something going on with him,” said Jackson. “Every time he gets up and talks to the American people, it’s not just the American people that are watching him speak, it’s the whole world, and that’s part of what the problem is here,” said Jackson. “[Biden] looks tired, he looks weak, he looks confused, he’s incoherent, and it sends a message of weakness all over the world, and they’re seizing up on that,” he added. A poll last week revealed that two thirds of Americans want to see Biden take the same cognitive competence test that Trump took when he was in office.

• North Korea resumed missile testing on Sunday following a pause during the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games. The latest is a suspected mid-range ballistic rocket, according to Bloomberg. Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi told reporters in Tokyo the suspected ballistic missile reached a maximum altitude of around 385 miles and flew 186 miles before splashing down in the waters outside Japan’s exclusive economic zone. South Korea’s military said the ballistic missile launch occurred at 0752 local time near Pyongyang’s main airport.

• The New Zealand High Court has upheld a challenge to a vaccine mandate for Police and Defence Force staff, stating that it was not a “demonstrably justified” breach of the Bill of Rights. Justice Francis Cooke was asked by a group of Police and Defence Force personnel to judicially review the vaccine mandate enacted under the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act in December. “ The Order does not involve a reasonable limit on the applicants’ rights that can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society and that it is unlawful,” Cooke said. “The order limits the right to be free to refuse medical treatment recognised by the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act (including because of its limitation on people’s right to remain employed), and it limits the right to manifest religious beliefs for those who decline to be vaccinated because the vaccine has been tested on cells derived from a human foetus which is contrary to their religious beliefs,” Cooke said.

• Jean-Luc Brunel reportedly gave 12-year-old girls to Jeffrey Epstein for his birthday. The fashion agent – who is also alleged to have abused Virginia Giuffre – was found dead in prison last week. The 76-year-old was also being probed for allegations of human trafficking and being part of a criminal conspiracy. Described previously as the paedo multimillionaire’s “best mate” and “pimp”, he is believed to have been a key member of Epstein’s inner circle.

News Burst 28 February 2022